Film In an attempt to what's become my routine, I was up bright and early to watch the Baftas being streamed on Facebook (for some reason). The best bit was obviously "Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game" "No!" mostly because it was the only moment in which either of the presenters, Stephen Fry and Sam Claflin went off script. Anyway, here's the usual predictions based on having only seen a couple of the films.

Boyhood. Though the appearance of The Grand Budapest Hotel is so many categories is gratifying given that its experimental use of changes in aspect ratio and sheer level of not trying to be an awards film. Plus is came out nearly a year ago which shows just how long the Bafta memory is.

Under The Skin. Though I haven't seen any of the others. For all I know if I'd seen Paddington this sentence would have begun differently. But I'll never forget seeing Scarlett Johannson walking part Primark.

Trash is an interesting choice here. Generally this is thought of as the foreign film category, but Trash was written by Richard Curtis and directed by Stephen Daldry and has Rooney Mara and Martin Sheen in the cast. But's a Brazilian co-production so there it is. Either way the Dardennes will win this.

Hello the craft categories. Hello Guardians of the Galaxy. Clearly should have been nominated for Best Picture, but Bafta tends to be even pretty conservative in these things but the whole thing is a nonsense anyway isn't it etc etc

Comics The adventure continues and here we go again. When I finished reading the Eighth Doctor novels a few years ago I had planned to return to him and read the comics and then catch up on the audios, but after spending most of 2013 watching my way through the whole of the television series I was a bit exhausted with the whole thing and still am to an extent. But Jac Raynor’s superb Review 2014 post from this very parish about being a Reginald Fortune completist has nudged me towards working my way through the rest of my favourite Doctor’s appearances, especially since last year’s screen disappointments have led to my fan gene experiencing a bit of a wobble. I’ve even considered selling on the earlier dvd versions of stories which have later been given special edition treatment. It’s that serious.

A few pieces of house keeping. The Eighth Doctor novels were approached much like the television series with length reviews filled with words, sentences and paragraphs and acres of analysis which was sometimes fun and sometimes a real drag and one of the reasons the whole process took longer than it should because of stopping after every novel and spent many hours in analysis, sorry, offering an analysis. Not now. I want to enjoy this. Everything from now onwards (strips and audios and any other prose materials which crop up) will be given a capsule review of roughly the same length (ten lines in Times New Roman 12pt on Microsoft Word 2000 if you must know), not least because I’ve already covered a lot of the audios in some depth elsewhere (which I’ll link to where necessary).

So that the blog isn’t then littered with these short bursts of text, I’ll also group most of these around recognisable seasons and sets and for the comic strips that means the four graphic novel reprints which appeared in the late noughties and are apparently soon to be reprinted. For some reason, perhaps to do with narrative flow, these aren’t printed in publication order, something I didn’t notice initially so some of these stories were read out of sequence but I’ve inserted the reviews back into the correct order. Which is an incredibly boring sentence but an important grumble. I didn’t notice until I reached the commentary at the back which is in publication order but in reading made me think I’d accidentally skipped some instalments like I did with that episode of The West Wing that time when I was watching all of those back.

We last left the Eighth Doctor leaping to certain doom at the end of The Gallifrey Chronicles in a story which was purposefully left open ended. As you know, my personal version of his continuity roughly expects the comics to fit after the books before leading into the audios mainly because it’s less fiddly than trying to put one lot of one thing between a bunch of something else. Some fans see major discontinuities between the versions of stuff like his home world between the various runs which often appeared simultaneously and created to purposefully contradict each other (often, frustratingly, by writers who worked on all of them), but as we’ve seen in the television series recently, decades and centuries full of unseen narrative can occur between stories and runs of episodes which can later be enunciated or retconned where necessary.

Since there has to be a Gallifrey in existence at least so that it can be part of the Time War, there’s nothing to say (unless I’ve missed this story somewhere along the line) that between The Gallifrey Chronicles and End Game, that the Doctor hasn’t used the knowledge in his head to somehow recreate his home world, but that it’s the version which appears in the comics rather than the one it became in the books. In The Final Chapter (see below) there’s even a suggestion that Doctor is a myth, and the stories could perhaps have derived from his memories having become part of the planet’s lore. Having all of that removed could have helped his memory somewhat which was also flooded with everything which happened during the earlier runs of the comic strip to become foremost in his mind which is why he decides to pay Stockbridge a visit.

End Game

What’s primarily notable about Eighth’s first comic strip is how it follows many of the tropes of most other post-regenerative stories (even though it isn’t quite that) whilst being simultaneous very assured. The Doctor returns to old strip location Stockbridge, where he bumps into the Celestial Toymaker who puts him through the usual games. As writer Alan Barnes admits in his commentary, they were still hedging on who this new Doctor was and he is fairly generic. Not so Izzy, who’s immediately defined as the contemporary companion in the mould of Polly, Ace and latterly Sam, Lucie and Rose. Her look is apparently based on Louise Wenner, he says. I wonder if she knows. I definitely disagree with his assessment of Sleeper (“utterly rubbish”). No they’re not.

The Keep

Empirically, not a lot happens to the Doctor here. He and Izzy land on Earth in the future during some T-Mat wars, are menaced by the pirate lackeys of Magnus Greel, before being beamed into the eponymous Keep where Eighth is forced into doing a thing (because he’s “a good man” no less) which then results in another thing and then it ends, his lack of real agency neatly hidden below some glorious artwork penciled by Martin Geraghty and inked by Robin Smith (with biblical connotations in places) and epic exposition. But it’s clear we’re world building already, setting material up for later in the series which shows a real confidence from the editors and the magazine that both they and the comic strip had a future in the wilderness years. The final page is as mature and robust as anything I remember seeing in 2000AD underscoring the strips position in the UK comics ecosystem.

A Matter of Life and Death

The Eighth Doctor’s first one shot which and a continuity fest apparently designed to demonstrate that this version of the character is still very much part of the comics mythology in a way that it wouldn’t really be when the show returned to television in 2005. The dream sequences allow for all kinds of sight gags and cameos most of which I don’t understand (having not read many of the earlier strips yet), but none of that stopped my enjoyment (which is as it should be). The Doctor and Izzy are already comfortable in each other's company in despite this being only their third story and seventh issue taking into account how these were originally published and also how the series was originally broadcast. Often a TARDIS team would be firm friends as though they’d dozens of adventures even though they’d really only just met (cf, Fifth and Peri pre-Big Finish).

Fire & Brimstone

Daleks! Russell T Davies! How different nuWho must have seemed to fans who’d read Fire and Brimstone, which mirrors the final stories of the first series in structure with The Long Game (as per The Keep) setting up events for the finale, with an extermination which is actually a teleport and the action taking place on a space station which ultimate resembles in form and capability the Reality Bomb in Journey’s End. Moffat was also influenced by the Dalek zombie creating nanites. But we’re also sequelising previous DWM comics with the return of Threshold, whose existence is helpfully explained in a text prologue in this graphic novel edition. Eighth’s more clearly developing to reflect how he’d become in the other media too, though it’s Izzy who is first to say “Stupid, stupid, stupid…”

By Hook or By Crook

To spoil the ending, Scott Gray’s first Eighth strip is resolved using what’s now often described as a Moffat loop, a piece of foreknowledge utilised to get the hero out of a jam creating a paradox, in this case in a way which isn’t that dissimilar to The Big Bang with Izzy simply reading a book published in the future which has information which proves that the Doctor is innocent of a series of kidnappings by explaining who the real culprit is and releasing him from jail. There’s also a perennial scene in which the Doctor assuming all is lost says his final goodbyes to his companion explaining how the TARDIS will take her home when necessary. It’s about this time the way Izzy’s being drawn. Out with Louise Wenner and in with Luisa Bradshaw-White who played Kira in This Life. Welcome to 1997.

Tooth & Claw

A tribute to the Hinchcliffe era, we’re in gothic horror territory but as is always the case in Doctor Who what seem like vampires, or at least Bram Stoker’s variety, are nothing of the sort. There’s also Christie and Connell references in there too. What’s notable is how on some occasions a returning Barnes is taking full advantage of the monthly nature of the strip to create cliffhangers with real impact but on others it’s as though he’s assuming the stories will eventually become graphic novels so the scenes run on easily across the chapters to point its easy to miss that we’re into another part (which could be a homage to the how the tv series was originally released on video?). Features the first appearance of Fey Truscott-Sade who it seems had an adventure with the Doctor we’ve not seen ala the Paternoster Gang in A Good Man Goes To War.

The Final Chapter

Gallifrey! And, oh boy, that ending! The fakegeneration is of course now a legendary piece of trolling from Doctor Who Magazine and gloriously bizarre now that Nick Briggs is such a public figure in relation to the franchise rather than simply known within close fan circles for the Audio-Visual productions. That readers genuinely believed in the change prefigures the conclusion of The Stolen Earth though in this case there was a whole month to speculate. In his notes, Barnes describes the messy gestation of the story, pages being written in a rush around his other work for the magazine simply so that the artist would have something to draw but with hindsight this isn't too obvious. These are all stories bursting with ideas with a sense of experimentation that typifies the Eighth Doctor in all his media.

Wormwood

Or three months until the reveal. Reading this in graphic novel form it’s difficult to quite fix on what the fuss was about but you can well imagine a readership quietly dividing across three months as to whether regenerating the Doctor in the strip was a good thing or not (especially since the post-regen is so authentic). The reveal itself is reminiscent of The Dying Days, the Eighth Doctor’s triumphant re-emergence though it’s notable that Izzy’s aware of it before the rest of us given the companion’s usual spot as our POV. The overall story is the usual cosmic, universe-threatening bursts of energy with massive awe-inspiring artwork by Geraghty and Smith again presenting images that could never exist on screen or even in a reader’s imagination. Scott Gray assumes the writers chair full time now and the shift is seamless.

Film After Doctor Who in 2013 and surfaces at home through 2014, my title bar theme this year is favourite films going backwards in time, one per year.

Since there's over a century of them, this should keep me busy through the blog's fifteenth birthday and beyond (he says optimistically).

Of course release dates are going to end up being pretty fluid so if, as in the case of Stories We Tell, it seems like I'm a bit out, it's because I don't see the point in not choosing the best film I saw in a given year just because its initial release date was a few years in the past and it say on the shelf.

Why this choice?

Because at its at the epicentre of film, of the interstitial space between fact and fiction, documentary and drama and while Boyhood is technically brave, Polley's film is emotionally heroic.

To say much more would be to ruin some of its virtues, so instead I'll simply link to it on Netflix, Amazon and the NFB (which is where I saw it) and suggest you avoid the synopsis and trailer.

Film As you will have noted during my wrap up of last year's filmapalooza, I only sat inside an actual auditorium about five times last year and on all occasions only when I had to.

To be fair they were all very good experiences with decent audiences who shut up during the film and mostly didn't sit anywhere near me, largely because I was on the front row so I wasn't sitting anywhere near them.

Good old Picturehouse at FACT.

If only modern cinema pricing was cheaper.

I really can't afford £9 an afternoon screening too often if I can also get as many films as I like at home for £10 a month (Netflix + Lovefilm-by-post) to watch on my decent sized screen.

"... when some gentleman in the row in front started tooling around on his mobile during the opening chimp sequence, we felt more than usually justified in politely asking him to terminate the distracting tomfoolery.

He turned around in clear possession of thoughts to share. I readied myself for abuse.

"Part of the cinema's service is that you can text the bar for a drink."

They then go on to describe how throughout a rare screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, every now and then a screen would light up and within minutes an usher would wander in to deliver drinks.

As the below the liners suggest, name and shame, name and indeed shame.

Awful, awful, awful. Is this prevalent? Does this happen a lot?

Quite a contrast to the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin which also serves food but has a zero tolerance for phone use. Must we watch this again?

Film As we've discussed before, one of the elements which streaming and by-post can't really replace in relation to the video shop experience is bumping into a straight-to-video work which doesn't seem to make sense. In other words, the cast is of the kind you'd expect to find in a major release and the box looks authentic enough but you've never heard of it before.

Step forward The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box which has finally been given a withering capsule review in this month's Empire Magazine (not online yet) despite being released on dvd at the end of last October. There they all are Sheen, Headey, Neill, Hawes, Gruffudd and Aneurin Barnard (who played Bobby in ITV's Cilla). It's based on a popular novel.

About Editorial note: I've just written then deleted a rather long blog post with the same title about deliberately not having opinions because I realised that even writing about deliberately not having opinions about some things included too many opinions about those things or at least opened the door to indicating what the things I wasn't deliberately voice opinions about were or rather are. Rather than leave the post empty, I thought I'd note the irony instead.

Dudeln: Vienna's own indoor yodelling:
"For many, yodelling is the sound of the Alps. Farmers used the warbling singing technique to communicate between mountain peaks. But the Austrian capital Vienna has its own special version of yodelling, known as Dudeln. It has been recognised by UNESCO as part of Austria's intangible cultural heritage. Bethany Bell met the dudler singer Agnes Palmisano."

A Night Out With Scarlett Johansson:
"It's so freezing in New York that I usually wear trousers for formal parties, though this year I want to wear more dresses with tights. I'm going to make some serious investments at Wolford. I don't know why New Yorkers don't wear tights as much as British people, I guess it's a cultural thing? But why wouldn't you when it's so cold?"

Florida HOA Issues Violation Letter On Fan Made TARDIS:
"This just might be the one problem in space and time itself the good Doctor can’t talk his way out of, or fix with the quick use of his sonic screwdriver. A couple in Florida built a replica TARDIS, because: (A.) They are huge fans of the show, and (B.) They wanted to use it in their wedding photos. Their themed wedding pictures went off without a hitch and the happy couple found a spot, temporary most likely, for the TARDIS in the driveway. Then the one power in the universe that even the Doctor wisely fears reared its ugly head, the dreaded Lexington Home Owners Association of Tampa Florida."

How Does The Proper ‘Doctor Who’ Fan Respond To An HOA Violation Letter? Throw A Viewing Party!
"Last week we brought you the story of the Moder family in Florida that received a HOA (Home Owners Association) letter about the big blue call box in their driveway. That’s right Doctor Who‘s TARDIS was minding its own business, trying to fix its Chameleon circuits while parked in the Moder’s driveway and the neighborhood HOA took offense. What’s a Doctor Who fan to do when your TARDIS doesn’t get the usual love its grown accustomed to receiving from fans around the world? Throw a huge Doctor Who viewing party!"

Emily Blunt: 'Nobody goes through life unscathed':
"Emily Blunt’s first professional acting job was at the age of 18, in a West End play called The Royal Family, directed by Peter Hall. It was 2001 and she had, until then, been labouring under the delusion she’d go to university and study languages. (Blunt wanted to be a simultaneous translator at the UN.) Instead, she found herself in a makeup chair backstage at the Haymarket theatre, being crept up on by Judi Dench, her co-star. “I just heard that voice in the room behind me,” Blunt says, “and I remember feeling the air go out of me. And she said, ‘Hello, darling. If anyone gives you any trouble in this, you come straight to me.’”"

Why Sweden Has the World's Safest Roads:
"Sweden is on its way to reaching zero road deaths per year. It’s an incredible feat, coming from a peak in road deaths in the 1970s. In 1997, Sweden implemented its now-famed “Vision Zero” plan in hopes of eradicating all road deaths and injuries, and it has already cut the deaths by half since 2000. In 2012, just one child under seven years old was killed on a road, compared with 58 in 1970."

Russia Is Building a Train That Will Zip From Moscow to Beijing In Just 48 Hours:
"Russia plans to build a new high speed railway, with trains that would speed from Moscow to Beijing in just 48 hours. At the moment, it takes about seven days to commute between the two cities and the route requires changes. According to Romanian website Glasul, the Kremlin has awarded the project to China Railway High-speed (CRH), a subsidiary of the state-controlled China Railway (CR), which is working in a joint-venture with the local firm Uralvagonzavod. CR is famous in the train industry for operating the world's only magnetic levitation train in an urban area, the Shangai monorail."

A Writer’s Worst Moment.
"I asked a large number of my writer friends and colleagues to tell me about the worst moments of their writing lives. I thought this might make other writers, particularly new ones, feel a bit better about their own situations, knowing that these guys have been through tough times and come out the other side. Of course, in a lot of cases, and this is something several of the respondents have pointed out to me, the worst thing that’s happened to a particular writer is a story that can’t be told in public, because other people are implicated, some of them innocent, some of them people one might want to work for again. Even this collection of third or fourth worse things will make your toes curl." -- Paul Cornell.

Archeologists discover mythical Tomb of Osiris in Egypt:
"Archeologists have discovered an ancient tomb modeled after the mythical Tomb of Osiris as described by Egyptian lore in the necropolis of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, on the West Bank at Thebes. The complex includes a shaft that connects to multiple chambers, including one with demons holding knives."